What Underachieving Middle School Students Believe Motivates them to Learn

Chapter 1: The Challenge to Educate Everyone Chapter 2: A Review of Literature Chapter 3: Methods Chapter 4: The Results Chapter 5: Discussion      An Emerging Theory        Experience        Meaning        Motivation        Environment        A Complex System        Research Implications      A Gap in Schools      Getting in the Way?      A Final Thought References Appendixes Biography

Research Implications This emerging model has several implications for researchers. First, although the similarities between the pilot and this study give some confidence to the results, it is important to remember that the two studies shared the perspectives of only six students. Many more case studies should be pursued. It would be interesting to see if there continues to be similarities in the results. Further, it would be interesting to look at differences between cases. Do students of different genders, races, or cultural backgrounds view motivation and learning differently? Do students with clear aspirations have different views than students who aren’t sure what they want to do in the future? Do students from high implementation middle schools believe differently than students from low implementation middle schools (Felner, et. al., 1997)? Are there different perspectives between students of differing socio-economic status? What is learned from continued solicitation of student voices will have implications for the evolution of the proposed model. As the data becomes richer, the model will be refined and expanded. At some point, it would be useful to gather widespread quantitative data about student perceptions, and the evolved model can provide a framework for what questions to ask. Perhaps the Aspirations Benchmarks Initiative could play a role in that work, since reversing underachievement patterns should positively impact student aspirations. Aspirations and meaningful, engaged learning are related, but different constructs, requiring questions to be added to the current survey. The Aspirations survey has few questions related to active, hands-on teaching, learning styles, meaning making, or choices and autonomous supportive strategies. A way to distinguish between achieving and underachieving students in the Aspirations data would also be useful, giving a way to compare differences between those two subpopulations for both the Aspirations work and the motivation work. Data from the pilot study and the current study hint that underachieving middle school students readily recognize themselves as people who are fairly bright, but either don’t do well in school or don’t like school much. Perhaps this information can be turned into a pair of statements to be used in the survey to identify underachieving students. Eventually, researchers should test the model, and explore the effectiveness of the strategies suggested above. It would be interesting to replicate this study (perhaps with more participants) in a school that had implemented the model for several years. More broadly, it would be informative to find out what impact implementing the model has on a variety of indicators, including student achievement, attitudes toward school, attendance, behavior, higher order thinking skills, and aspirations. Will instruction infused with hands-on work, choices, varied activities providing for different learning styles, and positive relationships with teachers actually improve learning and achievement for underachieving students. It is clear that the participants in these studies believe it will. Inspiring teaching might help with learning, but it might only make school more enjoyable or memorable for students. This distinction may be splitting semantic hairs, but part of one student interview begged the question. Eric was discussing how he thinks he learns better when doing more active work, such as experiments in science class: S: In science class, she likes us to do a lot of labs, but we haven’t really. Like earlier we were doing... earlier this year we were doing bubble labs and I like doing that and we’ve been doing weighing labs, and... R: What did you learn from the bubble lab? S: Well, what we did with the bubble lab is we were measuring circumferences and everything and I don’t really remember cause that was in September and.... R: But you remember doing it, and you remember liking it? S: Right. Right. R: Um.... S: No, wait! Now I remember! R: Sure. S: We were doing Bernoulli’s Principle! R: Bernoulli’s Principle? Do you remember what Bernoulli’s Principle is? ‘Cause I’ve forgotten. S: Well, something that has to do with the.... You’d think I’d remember since I did a science project that had to do with Bernoulli’s Principle... Don’t remember. Eric remembered doing the bubble lab, and he remembered doing a science project on Bernoulli’s Principle, but he didn’t remember anything about the science concepts he was expected to learn. It is hard to judge the meaning of such an interchange. This might have been an isolated incident and he remembers the lessons from other hands-on work he has done. Or perhaps given more time, when he wasn’t in the middle of an interview, he might remember the relevant concepts. It might also be the case that in the future, when he returns to Bernoulli’s Principle in high school or college, this middle school experience has laid the groundwork in his memory to develop a rich understanding of the concept. Even if Eric doesn’t recall the specifics of Bernoulli’s Principle, did those experiences help him develop better higher order thinking skills? It’s also possible that having positive memories of projects and experiments is better than having no memories of science at all. We don’t know how these experiences have impacted Eric’s attitude toward science and toward school. Did such experiences increase his willingness to participate (mentally and physically) in other lessons? The point is simply that the following question bears investigation, "If we give students what they say they want, will they really learn better, and in what ways?"

Web site created by Mike Muir Send questions or comments to wilder@somtel.com Last updated April 25, 2001

Mike Muir Assistant Professor of Education University of Maine at Farmington 104 Main Street Farmington, ME 04938 207.778.7179 wilder@somtel.com http://violet.umf.maine.edu/~mmuir